CULCHIES AND Dublin footballers. Brian McMahon's days are filled with their noise and notions. Take last Monday. He sauntered into the bus depot minding his own business and there they were. All the culchies.

They saw Macker and suddenly their arms shot towards the heavens. From their mouths issued strange war cries. Whooping. Hollering. Roaring.

"What?" demanded Macker.

"Yeeeeeooooowwwwwwwww!"whooped the culchies.

"What's wrong with yiz?" said Macker, concerned.

"Beaten," said the culchies, "the Dubs were beaten."

"Nah, nah, nah," said Macker, shaking his head patiently. He likes the culchies. The boys in the depot for instance, understand his hurling and make space for his hurling. They have earned his patience and his thanks.

"Nab. Let me explain it to you, said Macker "The Dubs aren't playing till next Sunday."

"Yeeeeeeoooooowwwwww!" said the cuichies again. "Meath beat yiz. Wahooo!"

And Macker looked baffled and shook his head and went on his way. Culchies all round and Dublin footballers casting a shadow. Being a Dublin hurler makes you some sort of blue-in-the-face consulate for the footballers. Wahoo. Business as usual.

Question: "Being a Dublin hurler, Brian, don't you ever feel second class?"

Answer: "To the footballers. Always."

The Dubs are playing tomorrow. Big day, big place, big game, high hopes. Dublin and Kilkenny, Croke Park, provincial semi-final.

High hopes? The Dubs can't even remember the tart, tangy, taste of defeat. They'd have to ring the Dublin footballers up to ask them about that.

Brian McMahon, restored to some of the form that made him the only Dub liner ever to get a hurling All Star award, is out on the wing tomorrow. For the first time that he can remember he goes into serious championship action wearing a Dublin jersey and carrying a comprehensive set of instructions. For the first time he's wondering what it would be like to play inter-county hurling in September. What it would be like to shunt the football Dubs into the sidings for a wee while.

Culchies first, though. He's surrounded by them. Thankfully.

Take Jamesie `Shiner' Brennan, for instance. Last summer Brian McMahon was back in blue after a two- year sabbatical. He hadn't expected it to be that way. The league campaign of `95-96 began with a terse phone call, during which McMahon was told that Dublin would be trying several new, young, malleable forwards.

Pause. Get the message, Brian?

Then two-and-a-half weeks before Dublin played Wexford in the championship, the imploring call came. Certain people weren't pouring into certain moulds. So McMahon slung on his helmet and went back. On the Thursday night before the game he sat with his back to the cool dressing room wall and waited for his name to be called out. And waited.

"What's the story?" he asked later. "You beg me to come back and then you don't play me?"

He didn't receive anything resembling an explanation, much less an apology. He grumbled all day Friday. At the Saturday morning puck around he decided that enough was enough and announced to a few friends that he wouldn't be coming to Croke Park the next day.

Shiner Brennan took him aside and told Brian McMahon not to make history of himself, not at 29 years of age with seasons of good hurling ahead of him if he wanted it. Options are best left open.

So he went to Croke Park and he came on as a substitute and, with complete disinterest, played out the dying minutes of a bad game against Wexford. A few months later ford were All-Ireland champions and Macker's phone was ringing again.

Here he is then. Shiner Brennan from Kilkenny was right. Hurling has never tasted sweeter than it does this week. Macker's infectious enthusiasm courses through the panel. Dublin wait to squeeze out their twist of history as hurling heads into its golden era.

The Dublin management team has changed of course. Michael O'Grady, a guru from Patrickswell at the steering wheel. The neon sign is flashing words of good things to come.

"The other crowd wanted a 1O year scrappage deal on me," says. Brian McMahon of the old administration. "Mick O'Grady is a different kettle of fish, though. We're going places."

McMahon was a child of the Lar Foley era, the star turn on a team which reached two Leinster Finals in succession in the early part of the decade and also set the league on fire one year. Foley was a "father figure" to McMahon. That sets the bar quite high for all successors. O'Grady breezes it.

"He just knows the stuff," says McMahon. "He has the discipline. It's a bit like being in the classroom when we're in the dressing room with him. It's all hurling, hurling, hurling. He's been involved in it all. He knows how fellas operate, he works on everything, sideline balls,frees, attacks, defence.

"So many things I never learned before. Visualisation. We do that. It ]really does work. Think of good moments, don't think of bad ones. Five, 10 minutes every day. We have `proper food, proper sleep. Good discipline on and off the field. I noticed the lads don't even curse anymore.

Once there was a naive enthusiasm and Lar Foley's hard work. Then there wasn't even that. Now there is meticulous organisation and a hurling brain which has made bold plans for the containment of DJ Carey tomorrow.

"He thinks of everything," says McMahon. "Every match he takes a list of fouls, good and bad, sideline balls, passes, wides, scores everything. Everybody is on a chart. About three or four weeks ago he gave us a complete list. We'd improved on everything except wides during the league. We're averaging between 12 or 14 wides a match. If we could score half of them it would be six or seven points. We've been doing that, too, working on wides."

The benchmark of progress is the old Lar Foley team.

"The team is faster than the old team. We were more physical then. We used to bulldoze and then get the ball to the fast fellas. We are very strong on the ball now, ground balls especially, and very fast around the field. Looking at Tipp and Limerick last week, the pace was very slow we were surprised at that.

"SO much has changed. He remembers leavening the heavy work before Christmas with a running practical joke about free boots for the team. He'd announce that another batch of free gear had come in the post `for him that morning and he'd inquire how come none of the young lads had gotten any. The soul of concern, he'd take their (details, their sizes their preferences for moulded or screw-in studs, any little quirks or needs. Each night he'd inquire if there was any sign of that gear.

"Mustn't be sending it to the young lads this year. Pity that, pity."

Then, a few weeks ago, Asics sent them all boots. Last week the man from Arnotts appeared out at training, holding a hurley and oozing good vibes. This week some suited dignitaries from the county board have been knocking about. Journalists are on the blower all day and steady on all of a sudden the Dublin hurlers feel very good about themselves.

It makes a change, this contentment, this confidence. Examine the business of the sabbatical, Brian McMahon's two-year break from hurling during which time he swapped codes and won two Towns Cup medals playing rugby for Naas.

He hardly missed hurling. His game had deserted him, his mood was foul and he was no longer the great white hope of Dublin hurling.

He'd broken eight fingers in just over two years. In fact, he'd done some spectacular damage to the middle finger of his left hand, driving the top half of the finger down through the middle joint so that he was left with a bulging digit which wouldn't bend. It was left to give the world the finger.

He visited, ahem, a handful of finger specialists, the second last of whom proposed cutting the thing off and the last of whom fixed it so he can bend it a little and he doesn't have to give oncoming motorists the finger as he drives the number 1O bus towards Belfield.

It wasn't just his fingers which were broken and giving pain during. the winter months. His spirit was battered. He couldn't remember having a rest from hurling since he was 10-years-old.

So just before the winter hit his bones, he said no more to the bad days and big fellas walking on you, and he packed it in. He hadn't seen it all, but. he'd seen most of it and, `grown sick of most of it.

He is glad now. The break worked like a tonic. McMahon isn't the. quicksilver genius of six or seven years ago, but his game is regaining both its shape and detail. He doesn't carry the burden of being a big name in a small world anymore, either. Dublin have imported a little talent and developed a lot of it.

"We have the players now. We set ourselves a target to win the Walsh Cup this year, to get promoted, and to get to the Leinster final. After that we'll look at the targets again. Imagine Dublin setting targets like them and believing in them."

Michael O'Grady's platform for delivering Dublin to the big time is fitness. They reckon they are among the three fittest sides in the country right now. It started back in October in Fairview Park with a few bad experiences.

John Thompson, their fitness coach, nearly killed Macker. He thought he was going to die at the hands of his old teammate.

"We'd run the whole perimeter of Fairview Park, three of four times after doing some hard work on the Hill at the back near the railway line. John would get the two fittest lads up front and mark out the circuit and at various points they'd have to up the pace. This was October.

"You'd be trying to take a rest behind the trees and John would .step out. He'd be waiting for you. I. lost at least a stone. We'd finish in Fairview and then we'd head up the coast road up to Dollymount Bridge,, sprinting and going at three quarter pace. Then back again. Stretching and jog back. The cars would be parked back at the traffic school. Heading towards Dollymount. Bridge you'd pass them and wonder if you'd ever see them again. My face would be pounding. My whole. body would be wrecked, but I'd look around at the young lads and be the same. We survived."

They kept switching training venues after that. They went to Scoil Ui Chonaill in Clontarf for a while. One evening they had an army obstacle course in Cathal Brugha Barracks for diversion. This spring, as interest in their exploits grew, they hid out on a corporation pitch in the depths of St Anne's Park in Raheny. Just lately they've slipped into Parnell Park.

"You can feel the big match approaching," says McMahon. "The belief after the league run is amazing. Nobody beat us. We're not that bad. We beat some tricky teams. Lads are starting to believe they could do it. We played Galway in Ballinasloe a couple of weeks ago and beat them down there."

He looks back on the old team. Two Leinster finals. Didn't know they were born. Managed to make their greatest moments forgettable.

"We just thought getting into a Leinster final was fine. If we won we'd be remembered, if we lost we'd be remembered. We let it slip past us. I tell the lads now, if I had one more chance...

"This team believes in there being an All-Ireland. We can go places. People say three years and Dublin could win an All-Ireland. The lads are saying why not this year. Why let another year go by. Let's do it now. Wexford did it. Clare did it. Why can we not do it?"

And Macker heads back to the bus depot, whistling the marching son of the Dublin hurlers: `Culchies do it. Footballers do it. Even minors,from Westmeath do it. Let's do it.